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jStarsinger

What is Human Nature?

In Modernia we are trained to be alone

Would you dress like a Peruvian lady on a daily basis regardless of career or friend circles? I dare you to! See, we all need to fit in. We are part of collectives within collectives and it’s terrible to be shut out.

Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics—including ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—which humans tend to have naturally. Wikipedia

Wikipedia is quoting the consensus, but how accurate is that in the age of indoor living? Can we know our “natural state of being?” From the second of conception we are influenced by our environment; and if we had been born into a different latitude, we might be quite different. Born in a cave would have a different effect from born in a hospital delivery room. A mother on drugs (they gave me a bit of Demerol) will give birth to a drugged babe. Both my boys were drug addicts at birth.

We can’t know what humun nature is, until we strip away all the culture interference that has been pasted onto our psyches and our bodies, with paper mache’  layers since the days we were seeded. Born in 1950, we kids were all born addicted to alcohol and nicotine. Our up and coming parents partied like never before. Mommy martinis were all the rage!

Babies Captured in Plastic Seats

Until that hard baby seat is peeled off, we don’t have a clue what our “natural” state of being is or could be. Modernia babies are usually in some conveyance. They go from the car seat/carryall into a bouncy seat in the living room. Who holds the babies nowadays? Environment indoctrinates us. Does the doctor hold up baby by the feet and give her a fanny whack? Oops. That is the first lesson in aggression. Does baby lie on mom’s chest naked to crawl around rooting for a nipple? For heaven’s sake no, don’t be ridiculous, how disgusting! That is what animals do. Or is baby bundled into blankets and given to mom completely covered after invasive blood pricks? So much for bonding.

Delivery room practices could be the culprits for babies’ first lesson in being a loner/mass shooter. It is a powerful tool. Isolation can “make” a monk spiritually strong, or a depressive “emo” teen, having grown up in plastic conveyances. It’s all the same.

Neptune = Movies and TV – They Teach us our Nature

Seeing is believing. The kitten learns to wash herself by watching her mother. The kitten is not secured in a container for safety’s sake. She spends all her time with her mom, learning how to be a cat. She suckles and kneads on her mom. She leaps on her head until mom says “enough” with a paw tap. There is no talking. No reasons. No admonitions.

Those who tell that violent video, tv and movies don’t effect the young are either lying or uninformed. Ever since “moving pictures” of all kinds, we have had to grapple with the visual fallout from these media. As an Archetypalist you know that NEPTUNE rules images, like the media, and also fashion, magic (as in illusion), delusion, poetry, dance and the arts.


waterturtle

We rather fail as self-realized autonomous beings. I say this because it is funny that we learn from watching, which is not the linear, rational mode that we embrace and call science. We are most probably in denial when it comes to that.

Touch is Important

This is Venus. She is distinctively feminine. She is also resting because she is distinctively Taurus. That means a bit lazy. The sensual one of the zodiac is the expert of the senses. She is fresh fruit and vegetables, milk and honey and all that fertile action that creates worlds.

We don’t talk about touch very much. We are more interested in sight and sound, but sound is actually vibration touching the eardrum, so sound is touch. As kids we asked which would we rather lose, sight or hearing? We all said hearing. We are attached to sight, and it is after all, an inconvenient sense to lose. Nowadays I realize how empty I would be without the refrigerator humming, and that persistent leaf scraping the screen, my heartbeat, the cat purring or even my own songs. We aren’t trained to follow our senses. In fact we are taught to discount them. Science is the “thing”, that requires proof. Senses are subjective, thus unprovable.

States of being are lost in translation. It is hard to tell another about yourself, but it is easy to understand another if you spend time with her. They say “talk is cheap” and I get it, we do talk too much; explain too often; over reach habitually. But words are tools. We must hook into emotional states to understand the meanings of words. The great orators did that in ways that stirred crowds to goosebumps and loud cheers. They sent the power of words on the vehicle of understanding. They said they knew their audiences. Then they told them what they knew about them. The crowd went wild. We all want to be discovered.

We don’t learn from words, we learn from the emotional power punch that is riding on the back of a Cadillac, waving to the crowd like a prom queen. This imagery takes me back to the question:

What is humun nature? Is it even real? I don’t think we could identify it were it a custard pie in our faces. I think the words are used to excuse people from their bullshit actions and society from its own stupidity. And in the meantime we still don’t know our true nature. We only know ourselves from history (his story), which has been written by men and their violent natures, their wars, their dicks, their women and their seed (children) for a solid five thousand years.

Are we naturally aggressive?

Humun nature is born of humun experience. Raised in a rough culture? Then your humun nature is violence. Raised in Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s current baboon troop and you get to live a stress-free life actuated by the females, since the alpha males ate poison and died. Their baboon nature was violent, structured and stressful before, but after the alpha males died their baboon nature changed. Their cortisol dropped and they took to sharing and acts of kindness. Their “nature” changed overnight.

In conclusion, I believe we are naturally flexible. I believe that raising children a certain way will cause them to grow up that certain way. If a culture has too much violence, then we should change the ways we raise the children. We should be kind to them; treat them with the same deference that we treat other humuns; be supportive but not insincere; tell them the truth. There is plenty of magic in the real world to keep them busy.

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